Keep employees happy by taking control of payroll

Last updated:August 29, 2018

As your small business begins to expand, you’re likely to start taking on employees and forging a workforce of your own.

This is a greatly rewarding experience. Not only will you have a loyal team backing your venture and putting their all into seeing you succeed with your business dreams, but you will also see your company become more productive in a very short matter of time. It’s important that you don’t begin to take these people for granted.

After all, they’re now forming the backbone of your company, and they need to be the most avid supporters of your brand. The happier they are with their job role, the harder they are going to work and the more bang you’ll get for your buck. So, how do you go about keeping your staff base happy and contented?

There are plenty of places to focus on, but a good place to start is payroll. It is now your responsibility, as an employer, to ensure that everyone is paid fairly and on time. Here’s how to guarantee that your staff members are paid the right amount and that the payments go into their accounts on time.

Taking Payroll into Your Own Hands

If you only have one or two staff members, you may be reluctant to outsource the task of payroll or bring someone in as another permanent employee to conduct the task in-house. Afterall, how hard can it be to process a few payments?

Well, the answer is that it can be surprisingly difficult. Especially when your attention is directed in other directions such as product development, business relations, branding, or marketing. You may also not be the most arithmetically talented, which could result in mispayments, which cause further complications as you try to rectify the situation.

Luckily, there are a couple of things you can do to make the task easier for yourself. Consider using the free calculator by Humanity which simplifies things. You simply enter the staff members’ working hours for each day, add any breaks, and their working hours will be worked out automatically. You can then easily work out how much they are owed by multiplying their working hours by their hourly rate.

Outsourcing Payroll

As your staff base grows and there are more and more individuals to pay, you can begin to experience payroll problems.

Things aren’t always as simple as processing how much each employee should earn, after all. People are liable to be late to shifts, miss multiple days work for sickness or book days off for holiday and other reasons. This means that managing everyone’s pay can become a long and drawn out process.

When this comes about, you might want to consider outsourcing your payroll. This takes a huge pressure off your shoulders, as an external agency will take care of absolutely everything on your behalf (for example besides automated payroll, a company like Justworks has access to HR tools, employee benefits and compliance support).

This means that you can spend less time crunching numbers and more time working on areas that will see your brand flourish.

These are the two main options available to small business owners. So survey your current situation and work out which best suits your business needs.